GE Healthcare introduces Discovery CT750 HD FREEdom Edition

Announcing a leap forward in advanced cardiac imaging, GE Healthcare introduces the FDA 510(k)-pending Discovery CT750 HD FREEdom Edition at the opening of this year's American College of Cardiology (ACC) Annual Scientific Session & Expo in Chicago. Addressing the main challenges of cardiac imaging - coronary motion, high heart rates, calcium blooming, plaque composition and accurate myocardial perfusion - the FREEdom Edition is designed to provide a new level of cardiac CT performance and to help physicians best serve patients.    

Discovery CT750 HD FREEdom Edition offers physicians capabilities that could change the rules of cardiac CT. Based on exclusive FREEdom technologies (Fast Registered Energies & ECG), this innovative system represents a three-prong improvement upon traditional cardiac CT: (1) Motion FREEdom, with intelligent motion correction via SnapShot Freeze; (2) Calcium FREEdom, with enhanced coronary visualization using Gemstone Spectral Imaging (GSI) Cardiac; and (3) Horizon FREE opportunities, going beyond today's clinical information with plaque material composition assessment and accurate perfusion calculations.

"FREEdom Edition has the potential to change the way we think about cardiac CT, both for the patient and the clinician," said Dr. Jonathon Leipsic, Head of Radiology, Providence Health, St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver. "By intelligently reducing motion artifact in CT images, SnapShot Freeze improves visualization, which is important for coronary artery interpretability."

SnapShot Freeze, one of FREEdom's breakthrough technologies, can help significantly reduce coronary motion and overcome the inherent limitation of all hardware-only solutions. By precisely detecting vessel motion and velocity, SnapShot Freeze can determine actual vessel position and intelligently correct the effects of motion during cardiac CT exams.

The Discovery CT750 HD FREEdom Edition is also the first cardiac spectral imaging scanner that merges GE's pioneering SnapShot Pulse technology with GSI's fast kV switching allowing for a registered spectral CT dataset that is then decomposed into material density images and synthesized into monochromatic energies. For the first time, coronary images with calcium suppression are possible for challenging patients with high calcium burden. Additionally, GSI Cardiac enables investigations into new horizons of CT coronary plaque assessment and quantitative myocardial perfusion.

GE's Discovery CT750 HD leads the industry in cardiac CT spatial resolution at 18.2 lp/cm. This improved resolution may help physicians make a more confident diagnosis and better quantify stenoses in coronary vessels by displaying reduction in calcium blooming compared to standard resolution.

GE Healthcare's continued leadership in cardiac imaging was recently highlighted when the Discovery CT750 HD was included in the first ever fully positive recommendation from the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) Diagnostic Assessment Programme, which aims to ensure the National Health Service can rapidly and consistently adopt clinically and cost effective technologies. NICE recommended the Discovery CT750 HD scanner as an option for first line cardiac imaging of the coronary arteries in people with suspected coronary artery disease.

"We believe the traditional challenges of cardiac CT are in large part beatable," said Steve Gray, vice president and general manager for CT and Advantage Workstation at GE Healthcare. "FREEdom Edition offers physicians a new tool to help overcome coronary motion, erratic heart rates and various artifacts that stand in the way of a highly accurate, confident cardiac diagnosis in a variety of clinical settings."

FREEdom Edition is built on the robust and proven Discovery CT750 HD platform. Installed in hundreds of medical institutions around the globe, this system is powered by GE's exclusive HD and low dose technologies, including GSI for lesion characterization and proven Adaptive Statistical Iterative Reconstruction (ASiR) dose-optimizing technology already used on over 10 million scans at 1,000 sites worldwide.